Keith,
I fear I can´t say you turned me into a writer, because I´ve been trying to get this novel done for ages now. But I can say you turned me into a writing writer again.
Before Scrivener I had always worked with two growing text files containing my draft, and a plethora of small notes files. But managing this growing mess slowed my writing down to nearly zero. In the last pre-Scrivener writing period I had even started to create different versions of the same text without carefully keeping track of the changes - I can´t remember what I was thinking doing that, probably I was desperately trying to get back to a more “innocent” way of writing (doing rather than controlling). But naturally it made things even worse.
Then, procrastinating, I stumpled over WriteRoom on Apple´s Mac OS X Downloads page. HogBaySoftware´s homepage told me to consider Scrivener. And, wow, that was a dream come true. Notes directly attached to bits of text - I had always felt I needed this feature but had not dared look for it. For some time I had even considered cutting my draft into chapters and putting my notes at the beginnings of these files, but I felt this would make them look even more stable / inalterable.
I bought Tiger (on a shiny new MacBook, to be honest) and Scrivener, and using it I realized the program was even better than expected - although I had expected nothing less than deliverance.
There had been two dreams about writing. Scrivener was build around the first one (the corkboard metaphor) and delivered the second one by the way: word frequency counts.
Compared to this, the fact that the annotations feature reduces the number of times I have to print my draft is just a useful add-on. (Up to now I used printouts for hand-written comments on wording etc. - but I knew I could have replaced this by using Word instead of the dated AppleWorks.)
Basically, it´s all in nine little words (and I hope they form an English sentence): You have turned me into a writing writer again.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Jan
p. s. I would love to contribute to the German localization.
Oh, and I noted your comments about the new highlights in the new beta, btw, I’m just waiting to see what others say.